THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKS - University of Torontoprojects.chass.utoronto.ca/semiotics/vol 15.2.pdf · THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 15.2 (2005) Table of Contents T he 20th

THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVOLUME 15.2 2005 ISSN 0847-1622http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb

Editorial

SpeedBy Bob Hanke

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Editorial: 1-5SpeedBy Bob Hanke

A Perilous Uniqueness 6-8By Lawrence Hazelrigg

SRB Insight: 8-12Deleuze, Peirce and the Cinematic SignBy Roger Dawkins

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THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVolume 15.2 (2005)

Table of Contents

The 20th century symbol of urgency isundoubtedly the ‘doomsday clock’ thatmade its first appearance on the cover

of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947.With its hands set to seven minutes beforemidnight, it signaled imminent danger toworld civilization. We were only a fewminutes from extinguishing enlightenmenttime and plunging humanity into a post-nuclear war eternal dark age. Since then, the‘doomsday clock’ has been reset to measureour proximity to the event of total atomicwarfare. After the collapse of the SovietUnion, it was set to fourteen minutes tomidnight. In 2002, the ‘doomsday clock’ wasreset to its 1947 position. As far as progresstowards nuclear disarmament is concerned,no time had passed between 1947 and 2002.

Paul Virilio was 15 years old in 1947.Living most of his life until his retirement inParis, Virilio’s disposition and work wasprofoundly shaped by the Second World War.At age 10, he experienced the destruction ofthe city of Nantes. While the architecture ofGerman military bunkers gave impetus to hisearly theoretical writings, the Blitzkrieg(lightning war) is the arc that travels acrossVirilio’s career. Indeed, for Virilio, theSecond World War has never really ended, ithas only mutated into pure, info war. Morethan anyone, he has thought about war asthe fabrication of speed, and about theessence of war as a war against time. Wehave passed, Virilio believes, from an order oflinear time inscribed within a myth ofprogress to a new temporal regime of‘timeless time’ where time does not pass andglobal nuclear accidents or – in the case of9/11, accidents merged with attacks – areprobable. His discourse has generateduncanny and trenchant insights into new

weapons technology, vision machines andour perceptions of reality. Perhaps the firstdecade of the 21st century should be knownas Virilian.

Paul Redhead’s Paul Virilio: Theorist for anAccelerated Culture explains and analyzesVirilio’s ideas and applies them to theanalysis of media events and popular culture.Redhead traces the historical development ofVirilio’s thought in order to rescue him frompresent-minded, hasty misreadings andmisinterpretations. Virilio’s books, with theirabrupt, jump-cutting statements, can be readas saying that new military technologies sethistory in motion and have made themodern condition. Reading Virilio’s accountof technologically-driven change, whichemphasizes how every technical inventionfabricates acceleration and invents accidents,Redhead is careful not to rush to theconclusion that contemporary culture ismerely the consequence of the speeding upof modernity. He is quick to note that speedis relative, that delays happen, and that thesame technological changes in differentcultural contexts exhibit varying speeds.There is also more to Virilio’s story thanspeed. Acknowledging the tentative,fragmentary nature of Virilio’s thought,Redhead introduces the concepts ofaccelerated, dangerous, and criticalmodernity to bring Virilio’s distinctivecritical thinking into focus, demonstrate itsvalue, and define its problems and limits. Onthe one hand, these concepts enableRedhead to organize his critical survey andto differentiate Virilio from other theoristswith whom he has been compared. On theother hand, these same concepts tend todivide Virilio’s discourse into thematicclusters that do not exist in his texts.

Redhead’s map of Virilio’s critical trajectoryis less than ideal but it still provides avaluable introduction and user’s guide. Andnow that most of Virilio’s major texts havebeen translated into English, readers whofeel they are missing something can also referto the extracts of his life’s work put togetherby Redhead in The Paul Virilio Reader.

The first chapter – “Remember Virilio” –discusses the early Virilio. In the 1990s, thespeed up of his books and interviews, thepublication of The Virilio Reader (1998),edited by James de Derian, and the specialissue of Theory, Culture & Society, edited byJohn Armitage, created a minor Virilianscene. Redhead believes, however, that themore he was cited, the more what he said,and when he said it, “remains a mystery tomany who use his name” (2004a: 12). To sethis intellectual historical record straight, thischapter focusses on the neglected period ofthe 1950s and 60s and the influence thatreligion, war, contemporary architecture andFrench post-war politics had his work. Hediscusses Virilio’s identity as a catholicmilitant, his Christian existentialism, hisversion of materialism, his interest in socialreform and aesthetics, all of which inclinedhim towards unconventional, dissentingthought. Although Virilio would becomeknown for “dromology” – the study of speed– Redhead reminds us that “the linkbetween these poles – of inertia and speed –does not disappear from Paul Virilio’stheoretical landscape and is ever present inhis thinking” (2004a: 16).

Redhead describes how Virilio’s personalexperience of the Second World War gaveimpetus to his early studies of thearchitecture of German war bunkers. Welearn that it was not only the anti-aircraftbunkers that interested him but the coastalregion, as an “interruption, aninterface...places where things areexchanged, transformed”. His “bunkerarchaeology” expressed an interest inmilitary space (“Fortress Europe”) while his“Cryptic Architecture” concerned howbodies are “placed through their orifices ofcommunication in contact with the place –through the median zones of clothing,second ‘portable’ architecture, and objects...”(2004b: 16). Indeed, the idea of a body inmotion in relation to space and time –“habitable circulation” – was at the core ofhis radical architectural theories for post-industrial cities. But the failure to translatethese theories into architectural practice ledVirilo to shift his research focus from spaceto time: “to diverse phenomena ofacceleration in this era of the ‘global village’,from TOPOLOGY to DROMOLOGY, i.e.the study and analysis of the increasing

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speed of transport and communications onthe development of land-use” (2004b: 23).However, the political events of May 1968,the climate of Situationism and theinfluence of the Italian Autonomistmovement, brought an end to Virilio’sarchitectural experiments with ClaudeParent and marked the beginning of a newphase of his life and work.

The second chapter – “AcceleratedModernity” – unravels Virilio’s study ofspeed from the 1970s onwards. According toRedhead, there is no “epistemological break”between his early and later work. AlthoughVirilio has become known as “high priest ofspeed”, he has examined differentdimensions of speed within modernity. Atthe same time, there is more to his workthan speed effects. Redhead suggests wemight see Virilio as a “genealogist ofmotion”. The mobility and proprioception ofthe living body in relation to territory, ratherthan the laboring body of Marx, or thedocile body of Foucault, is fundamental. ForVirilio, the moving body is the measure ofour habitat and “new technologies makehabitation possible without moving” (Virilioin Redhead 2004a: 42). At modern speeds oftransportation and communication, themobility of the locomotive body reverses intolived sedentariness – what he calls “polarinertia”. Here Redhead discerns a sense of“paranoia and claustrophophia” in Virilio’sposition on the body and human nature,which is “pre-technological” and pre-exists“the formations of sexuality and the social”(2004a: 159). We might unpack Virilio’sdemobilization thesis a bit further. Virilioproceeds from the notion of our territorial,animal body and assumes a law of leastphysical effort. When technological speedovertakes metabolic speed, physical effort isreduced while our animal body is devalued,‘handicapped’ or rendered useless. Witnessthe person who steps onto an escalator andstops walking. But there is more at stakethan personal mobility and energy use. InVirilio’s evolutionary scheme, the humanspecies has proceeded from domesticatinganimals to domesticating the ‘animal body’of workers or citizens into great, souless,military rather than democratic,mobilizations. Mobility is also enhanced bytransportation and audio-visual vehicles, butnot without changing the experience oftravel or the tempo of everyday life. ForVirilio, the use of mobility refers toergonomic behaviour, the mobilization ofpeople into military duty, geographic,physical and information mobility (Berland2005).

If Virilio had limited his interest in speedto military technology and warfare, he mighthave been of interest only to militaryhistorians and strategic studies. Redheadargues that Virilio’s work best fits thetheorization of accelerated culture within20th century modernity because he hasprovided an explanation of how globalsociety works. Speed is central totransportation and communication, andcommunication at the speed of light is asintegral to world warfare as it is to globalcapitalism. Speed is fabricated by themachinery of culture; the techniques forhandling, recording, storing and transmittinginformation induce speed. For Virilio, “speed

is a milieu” for creating global wealth andworld vision; or, as Jacques Derrida (1984:21). once put it: “Capitalization – orcapitalism – always has the structure of acertain potentialization of speed”.

Redhead shows how Virilio’s writingpours over the flotsam and jetsam ofaccelerated culture, its historical origins, andmoral and ethical questions of the good lifeand society. One characteristic stands out:the hyper-violence that emerged in thedomain of war – Auschwitz and Hiroshima –and the domain of technology. When a newgeneration of weapons and spectacles ofmass destruction went on display in thesecond U.S.-Iraq war, Virilio continued tofocus on the effect of the technological‘generalized violence of acceleration.’ Viriliohas made many other claims about what isdisappearing, being taken over, replaced oreradicated within an accelerated culture; forexample, geography, history, territorialities,duration and delay. By the late 20th century,Virilio was convinced that we were living inthe sphere of Einstein’s theory of relativity.For some, this may put the question of timeand space beyond the threshold of humanperception and everyday experience, but forothers, this puts the question of informationmoving at the speed of light, along with massand energy, into the heart of matter. Whilehe may have brought theology andastrophysics too close together for culturalstudies of everyday life, Virilio has tried tokeep pace with the cultural consequences oftechnoscience, which has narrowed, if notclosed, the gap between physics andtechnics.

While speed and technology is central tohis discourse on the accelerated complexityof modernity, the theory of the image andthe culture of vision has been an importantparallel tracking shot. With The Aesthetics ofDisappearance (1991), Virilio addressed theshift from appearance to disappearance withthe acceleration of the still image. With thecinema’s illusion of motion, perception isrevolutionized and “[t]hings exist even moreso because they disappear” (Virilio inRedhead 2004a: 62). In War and Cinema:The Logistics of Perception (1989), thespeeding up of vision machines is geared tothe war machine as the histories ofphotography, cinematography and weaponryconverge, making World War I the first warfilm.

Redhead does not consider Virilio’scontribution to image theory, or hisdecorporation of the eye thesis, nor does hecompare Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearanceto other theorists of the visible and invisible,ocularcentricism, or image wars. He pointsout that War and Cinema is one of his mostcited books, but underplays its significanceand implications for further research intovisual cultural studies. In the context ofvisual technology history, Virilio’s essay onthe use of cinema techniques in war providesus with a relevant pre-history ofdocumentary filmmaking. Balloons, planes,and photography were used to expand thebattlefield of perception; to see at a distance,and not be seen, became essential to attackand survival. Harun Farocki’s documentaryfilm Images of the World and Inscriptions ofWar (1989) extends Virilio’s analysis by

showing that what you are able tophotograph at a safe distance may not bewhat you see. In 1944, an Allied aircraft tooktopographic photographs of industrialcomplexes that might serve as bombingtargets, but military interpreters failed torecognize that they had an aerial survey ofthe Auschwitz concentration camp. War andCinema tracks the perfection of the means ofelectronic war from Vietnam to the use of‘video missiles’ of the Gulf War. If World WarII marks the beginning of the derealization ofwar, Virilio described the scenario for anoptico-electronic war in which victory anddefeat would be played out on militarycommand and control screens and civiliantelevision screens in real, global time.

His descriptions of the coming “robotwar” are uncanny. Today, prototypes forpilotless bombers and cyberwarriors pluggedinto satellite-linked dataveillance networksand global positioning devices are beingtested. For Virilio, it is this revolution in thelogistics of perception that makes militarytechnology the last art. For all of thesereasons, War and Cinema is a seminal text forscholars of visual culture and history.

As Redhead observes, dromologybecomes the dominant self-description ofwhat Virilio has been up to since thepublication in 1977 of Speed and Politics: AnEssay on Dromology. This book was his firstand last general theory book, so this is asclose as Virilio came to describing the socialformation of a “dromocratic society”. PopularDefense and Ecological Struggles (1990) was anattempt to correct misreadings of Speed andPolitics by Italian Autonomists and to enterinto debates over the military aspects of left-wing politics. Here Virilio draws uponClausewitz and Sun Tsu to address militarystrategy, the state, capitalism andcolonialism. Contrary to Marxist or Weberiantheory, Virilio argues in Speed and Politics thatmilitarization undergirds proletarianization.In Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, hewrites:

What developed in the battlefields offoreign and civil wars was not only the discipline of intelligence andbodies, the elimination of individual conduct, but also the entire ethic ofthe industrial world and its pseudo-revolutions. Thus, we mustnever lose sight of the very reason for the historic rise of themilitary-industrial proletariat, the ‘trade union school of war’: thearmy-State’s search for pure power, for pure energy… . In thissense, the proletariat’s determining role in history stopped with thebombing of Hiroshima. (Virilio in Redhead 2004b: 51-2).

The war of movement whichcharacterizes inter-state conflicts mustmobilize the slow military masses by “anincreased effort in the technical domain, aneffort centered on the suppression orreplacement of the human factor in themachine’s overall workings” (Virilio inRedhead 2004b: 51). In 16th centuryEurope, a colonial strategy begins to governthe exchange of violence and “differences aredrawn between those populations capable ofproviding war with the infrastructures of its

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conductivity (literally, its media); and thesubjected, underdeveloped others, chosen fortheir inaptitude at maintaining this level ofviolent exchange” (Virilio in Redhead2004b:53, italics in original). By 1914, theproletariat stopped being the motor ofhistory. The mode of production of war is thereal motor of history: “The historical effort ofthe West is thus the distribution andmanagement of independent, increasinglynumerous groups by the State warenterprise” (Virilio in Redhead 2004b: 47-48). Today’s “autonomous terrorists” areoften yesterday’s US funded and trainedfighters.

This brings us to the issue of Virilio’sown political commitments and readings ofpolitics. Redhead notes Virilio leanedtowards social reform and the plight of thehomeless and the poor rather than party orsocial movement politics. While Virilio hasbeen an “astute observer of world politics”since the 1970s (Redhead 2004a: 58), he isalso an academic who remained“unconnected to any of the currents inFrench, and indeed wider, European,politics” (Redhead 2004a: 157). Virilio’sliberal humanism is anchored in Christianityand phenomenology but he is a “realist”when it comes to science and the humanbody. He also has described himself as‘urbanist’, a ‘democrat’ and ‘citizen of theworld’. Although he was not linked with newleft activism and did not believe inRevolution, he deemed it urgent to analyzethe military institution or risk “failing(voluntarily or not) to effect the mostnecessary de-institutionalization of all: thatof the military” (Virilio in Redhead 2004b:55). Redhead notices Virilio’s Catholic-based‘anti-statism’ more than his anti- ‘militarysocialism’, but it is evident that one size of‘politics’ does not fit him. I would say thatthere is a close proximity between Virilio’sacademic work and what Pierre Bourdieu hascalled “scholarship with commitment”(Bourdieu 2003), but instead of firing backagainst neoliberalism, he has fired backagainst the “theory of war as the geometricbasis of all reality” (Virilio in Redhead2004b: 52). Although Redhead points outthat the state and power are problematicconcepts in Virilio’s work, we should not beafraid to enlist Virilio in the pedagogy ofpolitics; indeed, students can stopcollaborating and join the resistance today bydoing Virilian readings of contemporary USmilitary culture.

Cut to American Defense SecretaryRumsfield’s office, where he is standing at hisdesk. His techno-entrepreneurial strategy fortoppling the government of Iraq requiredabandoning the army’s perspective on themilitary labour needed to secure the territoryafter victory in favour of deploying onlythose units necessary to rapidly advanceupon Baghdad by using Special Operation’sUnits and advanced technoscientificweapons such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Decreasing the mass of soldiers andincreasing the velocity of ground forces ledby air force, the battle was reduced to threeweeks while the war against “insurgents”continues, at the time of this writing,indefinitely with growing numbers of civilianand military casualties. Rumsfield’s gambitwas that a militarized proletariat would not

wear out before their service contractexpired and the US brand of instant‘democracy’ (an election, a constitution, andan International Monetary Fund package)could be exported to the bombed andbeleaguered Iraqi people. As Peter Sloterdijkhas imagined, Operation Iraqi Freedom wasonly missing one piece of militaryparaphenalia— the dropping of an ‘inflatableParliament’ in the middle of Iraq (Sloterdijkin Latour 2005).

In “Dangerous Modernity,” Redheadaddresses Virilio’s vision of the dangerousconsequences of accelerated modern culture.Where we may perceive technologicalchange and social progress, Virilio sees theinvention of accidents and disaster and theend of a world. The post-cold war era meantthe end of nuclear deterrence so thepossibility of atomic war between old andnew members of the nuclear arms club stillhangs over our heads. But after 9/11, U.S.foreign policy and military powerimplemented the doctrine of perpetual,preemptive war against future “terrorist”attacks. This state of organized chaos inbetween war and peace has been on Virilio’sradar a long time. During the 1990s, Viriliowas an astute commentator on war andterrorism, yet Redhead shows that this topicdoes not exhaust his analysis of dangerousmodernity.

What is Virilio’s diagnosis of modernity?Neoliberal triumphalism and technologicalevolutionism aside, Virilio disputes thosewho contend that we have reached the endof history or of the human. For Virilio, whathas been coming to an end is the “bodyproper” and the “world proper” – ourcontact with other humans and ourorientation to the earth. Redhead reads thisas nostalgia and paranoia but this may be tooeasy. To be sure, Virilio is challengingtechnofundamentalists and technotopians byoverexposing technology’s ‘negativity’ but hedoes so in the name of an “ethics ofperception” and the values of a “greyecology”. What has come to an end, afterthe communications revolution constructsour “critical space” and our “landscape ofevents” is a certain spatiotemporal regime.“The common denominator”, as Redheadsums up, “is that ‘space has becometemporal’ and the technology of mediaculture is central to this process” (2004a:81). The more we live amidst the vectors ofa virtual geography, the more our forms oflife are disembedded from human time-space, the greater the probability thataccidents will happen everywhere at thesame time. Virilio’s de-localization thesisdoes not concern itself with our sense ofplace, identity, or community, but thereplacement of urbanization by the ‘worldcity’ and the replacement of traditional,industrial war by a virtual, cyberwar thatnever ends. While military and mediatechnologies have been speeding up for sometime, the second US Iraq war achieved thecomplete synchronization of militaryintelligence and civilian news media vectorsin real-time. The consequence, in Virilio’sview, is that history is no longer tied to localgeography or bounded architecture butsynchronized with one world time. Thismeans that media representations are notjust constitutive of the event, but have

entered into the time of the event. WhatCNN provides is not a first draft of history,but rather ‘live’ newsflashes of historyfollowed by other ‘mediated blitzes’ and soon.

Redhead notes that Virilio’s portrayal ofthis mediascape does not correspond to anyknown method or social science theory.Virilio approaches the ‘truth of history’ bytrying to keep pace with fast internationalnews about current accidents, events andincidents. Focusing on atypical eventsbetween 1984 and 1996, A Landscape ofEvents (2000) plays events backwards to givean impression of accelerating reality.Positioned in between the essay andnarrative history, it attempts to reformgeneral history by stepping back fromatemporal perspective and forwarding intothe fractal history “of the limited butprecisely located event” (Tschumi 2000: xi).Virilio paints a landscape where social spacehas become temporal and immediacy prevailsover temporal depth. The form of this bookenables us to feel that “society has becomeentirely a function of time, and that durationhas become a conjunction of simultaneities”(Tschumi 2000: viii).

If, for Virilio, the era of acceleratedculture and total war began with World WarII, a new era begins with 9/11. Historicallyspeaking, after mechanization, motorization,and automation comes cybernation, and awhole new mode of destruction. Total atomicwar has not happened, but World War IV,though not declared, is already happening.Virilio attempts to relocate the source of ourfear from ‘radioactivity’ to media‘interactivity’, from the possible explosion ofthe atomic bomb, which destroys physicalmatter in an instant, to the undeterredimplosion of hyperspeed that deprive us ofdecision-making time, and thus, moralresponsibility and political choice. War hasbecome an automated, autonomous zone inorbital space; at the same time, terrorism hasmutated into ‘large scale terrorism.’ On theone hand, this makes a large-scale cyberneticaccident probable; on the other hand, it alsomeans that events and accidents willconverge in the real-time, live mediascape.

While Virilio has actually written verylittle about what happened on 11 September2001, Redhead usefully applies a Virilianperspective to the attack on the World TradeCentre. In this attack, the accident and theattack merged. The attackers, armed onlywith box-cutters, hijacked two planes andturned them into weapons by crashing theminto the twin towers of integrated worldcapitalism. Virilio’s thinking about accidents,terrorism and media enables a twofoldconclusion about a possible “OneMan=Total War” scenario: first, large-scaleattacks can now be carried out by a smallgroup with minimal means, and second, theattacks can be timed to be seen (and reseen)as ‘live’, real-time television by billions of TVviewers. Redhead also reveals that there ismore to this tragic, spectacular event thanmeets the eye. There are fascinating linksbetween ‘reality-based’ computer games andthis event. Video and simulation, video andaccidents, have their own longer history.

With the advent of multimedia“interactivity”, Virilio believes TV as a

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cultural form is dead, but the TV screenfunctions as an “actual museum ofaccidents”(Virilio in Redhead 2004: 102).Redhead describes how Virilio’s dream of amuseum of accidents was finally realized inthe form of an exhibition – entitled Ce QueArrive – in order to preserve 9/11 and otherdisasters and explode the ideology ofprogress. Thus, the dromocratic society isalso the society of the accident: “A societywhich rashly privileges the present – realtime – to the detriment of both the past andthe future, also privileges the accident”(Virilio in Redhead 2004b: 256). If theconcept of time has changed, so has theconcept of the accident. No longer local andspecific, accidents are integral – global andgeneral. 9/11 was both a local catastropheand a global media spectacle and tragedy.Virilio follows ancient Greek philosopherEpicurus here: ‘time is the accident to endall accidents’.

Chapter four – “Critical Modernity” –situates Virilio’s extrapolation of Sun Tsu’s‘art of war’ into the ‘art of the accident’ inrelation to debates about postmodernism andpostmodernity. While a consideration ofpostmodern culture depends onunderstanding accelerated culture, Redheadargues that Virilio is a modern, not apostmodern, critic of the ‘art of technology.’At the core of Virilio’s aesthetic thought isthe idea that changes in form of art – the ‘artof the engine’ – means changes in speed,representation and ways of seeing. Accordingto Redhead, Virilio’s aesthetic and culturalpolitics is past ‘post’ theory.

While totalitarianism and terrorism havebeen abiding issues in his work, it is the fateof the city in the second half of the 20th

century that is a major matter of politicalconcern. Virilio posits that “the city is themajor political form of history” (Virilio inRedhead 2004a: 111) but this, Redheadnotes, does not make him a postmoderngeographer. For Virilio, urban habitation,circulation and trajectory is sociopoliticalbeing, since the ‘real city’ is site of the socialbody and the place where public spaces,gatherings, and images converge. With thecoming ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber’ city – alreadyprefigured by tele-cities – public space issupplanted by public image. The newDundas Square in Toronto is a perfectexample of a deurbanized, privatized,commercialized and mediatized space thatextends the suburban commercial televisionenvironment into the deregulated downtownof the post-industrial city. If the virtual worldcity “delocalizes work and our relationship toothers”, Virilio imagines the coming city as aplace for human habitation and communallife. Redhead acknowledges that Virilio’swriting about urban conflict sounds liketraditional urban geography and sociology;moreover, his emphasis on disorder,disorganization and disintegration echoesmore conventional criticisms of themodernist city.

The struggle Virilio brings to light is notclass struggle over the production of urbanspace but the struggle between metabolicspeeds (biological speeds), the speed of living(social speeds) and technological speeds(death). Virilio believes that if theinformation bomb accidented history, the‘transplant’ revolution and the genetic bomb,

in the name of improving humanity, willaccident the human race. We have neverbeen postmodern nor can we becomeposthuman. Virilio cannot envision life aftermodernity, or post-human hybrids of humanand machine. With the fusion of biology andtechnology, and the confusion of genetic anddigital codes, the race to genetically modifyliving organisms represents thetechnoscientific colonization of evolutionarytime in order to control the future ofsuccessor bodies and environments. ForVirilio, the ‘new eugenics’ is a war againstthe human race carried out by extremebiological science, like the stage of humanhistory, discrimination and control depictedin the science fiction film GATTACA(1997).

For Redhead, one problem is that Viriliohas “sometimes been bracketed with hismore famous countryman and friend JeanBaudrillard as a ‘postmodern philosopher’”(2004a: 115). Against such interpretations,Redhead rightly insists it is best to trace theactual influences on Virilio. In terms ofcritical modernity, this focus begins in the1960s with Virilo and Parent’s attempts tobring a new critical inflection to modernarchitecture. For Virilio, Merleau-Ponty andexistentialist psychology more than Marx hasbeen a major influence, but Redhead doesnot delve into Virilio’s phenomenologicalroots. Virilio’s ideas also developed outside ofSartrean existentialism, structuralism,deconstruction, and postmodernism butRedhead does not delve into the pre-modern, ancient ideas that Virilio is so fondof recollecting and quoting. Moreover, thereis no discussion of Virilio’s conceptualizationof geometric space, which undergirds hisconceptualization of “reality” and thehyperconcentration of time (Cook 2003).

To prevent Virilio from beingmisconstrued as a “postmodernist”,Redhead’s strategy is to compare him to JeanBaudrillard. What distinguishes Virilio’scritical modernity is not merely differentreadings of the same Gulf War; they alsodiverge on the question of image and reality.Virilio’s analysis of war and speed isaccompanied by moral (religious) and ethicaljudgement. Where Baudrillard sees asimulation of reality, or hyperreality, Viriliosees new technologies substituting a virtualreality for an actual reality. In Virilio’sduplication of reality thesis, virtual imagesbegin to shape real objects. Redhead leaves itto the reader to decide which analysis of thereal is more radical. Another key differenceis that Virilio fights “against thedisappearance of politics” (Virilio in Redhead2004a: 120). He affirms modern democracyand its institutions against dromocracy,against the tyranny of real time. If democracyrequires time, if political decision-makingrequires duration, accelerated politicsthreatens to make politics disappear andtotalitarianism reappear. There is a justice ofeconomy, wealth and speed. In this context,Virilio believes we are still free to choosebetween collaboration and resistance.Redhead observes that Virilio’s politicsappear to be more radical in the neoliberal1980s and 90s. We might also say that whatmakes Virilio’s thought radical is hisdetermination to analyze the temporalequivalents of spatial globalization, his bid to

radicalize the politics of time, and willingnessto take a chronopolitical stand in order todefend zones of existence not reducible toempty, homogenous, time. His is aBergsonian plea for ‘real time’ as the engineof duration rather than a precession ofimages of ‘instants’.

New, post-print, technologies are oftenlinked with the decline of book reading andthe rise of a post-literate public mind thatpasses through electronic or digital media.Virilio holds the modernist belief that thecritical mind still has time to pass throughthe discursive medium of books, so hisresponse to speeded up worlds of writing andreading has been to produce short, rapidworks that overlap with each other. In thefinal chapter, Redhead takes stock of theproblems with Virilio’s work. The firstproblem is that if Virilio’s life work werepublished in chronological order, they maynot have said that much. If that is the case,perhaps we should forget Virilio. Redheadsays this is not so easy, even if his aphoristic,imagistic, abrupt style is an obstacle for someand his short books may still beunconventional in the humanities and thesocial sciences. But where is it written thatlength is a measure of quality?

Another problem Redhead identifies isthe absence of popular culture. But eventhough he has concentrated on high orserious culture, Redhead makes this problemdisappear by crediting Virilio’s writings withplaying a major role in the subdiscipline oflaw and popular culture. Work onaccelerated youth culture adapted his‘pithyness’ in order to make sense of Britishacid house and rave culture and theirsuccessors. The life cycle of underground andoverground popular music seemed toapproach ‘Pop time ’– the Virilian ‘instantpresent’. But if Virilio’s contribution tounderstanding youth culture is very crypticand reiterates an ‘infantalization’ thesis, weshould not be that disappointed. His ownyouth, after all, was shaped by World War IIand religion. If Virilio had little to say aboutthe popular culture of the 1960s, 70s, and80s, his concerns for the body, movement,and speed at least enabled him to appreciatethe significance of 1990s popular music anddance trends. Virilian traces and tracks,Redhead maintains, are indications of hisrelevance to cultural studies even if it is upto others to follow up and fill in the gapswith greater specificity.

Following Redhead’s logic that Virilio hasmade important contributions by taking onwhat others leave out, one could also arguethat his works are also relevant to studying“informational culture” when informationaldynamics are prioritized over the formationof meaning (Terranova 2004). Even thoughshe does not cite Virilio, Terranova (2004:66) states: “From many points of view, aninformational milieu resembles more an openbattlefield of asymmetrical warfareconceptualized by post-cold war militarystrategists than a capitalist paradise”. Thiswould meet with Virilio’s approval. He hasanalyzed technology and events eruptingwithin close circuits of information andmilitary power outside the tradition ofcultural studies that has foregroundedsignification, articulation of meaning, andcontext. Redhead (2004a: 148) remarks that

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“it is a salutary lesson that Virilio, howeverwidespread his reputation has become, hasremained somewhat a marginal figure inmuch scholarship about the topics he hasaddressed over the last thirty years”. Perhapshe has not been widely cited because he hasranged so thinly over so many topics in orderto make his initial case about technologicalspeed up, modernity and the emerging formsof the in-human. There is one importantreason, however, to not forget Virilio: howhe frames his own idiosyncratic writingpractice. Instead of writing explanations,Virilio favours successive perspectives thatdo not construct a system. He tries to reachthe “tendency” of speed society in adeterrorializing state of emergency wheretime has gone virtual and becomedestructive force.

In the final analysis, Redhead concludesthat Virilio is a resolute high modernist whodoes not fit any poststructuralist,postmodernist, sociological, or critical socialtheory mold. He says his theoretical workhas had major implications for architectureeven as high technology is becoming ourarchitecture of time. He commends him forwriting well about the disappearance of the‘social’. In relation to debates overglobalization, however, Virilio has been anabsent presence. At the core of Virilio’sthought is an image of a shrinking world.While there have been previous waves oftime-space compression, the current wavewill be the last because acceleration hasreached the speed limit of light. Virilio hasprivileged acceleration in relation tomodernity, rather than globalization inrelation to capitalism: “Moreover, Virilio’sarguments about time and distance meltingaway, however initially seductive, are at sucha level of rhetoric and generality that all thespecific and local changes in economics andtechnology, especially at the level of regionaland national states, are completelyneglected” (Redhead 2004a: 149).

The reasons Redhead gives to forgetVirilio seem somewhat bizarre. First of all,Virilio is still alive so it is too soon to forgethim. Second, Virilio’s politics did notbecome more conservative like some of hiscontemporaries. Surely, this is a point ‘for’rather than ‘against’ Virilio? Third, he hasbeen anti-statist and lacks a theory of stateformation, but seems to have contributed anunderstanding of war and speed that hasbeen left out of state theory. Finally, Virilio’sbrief detour into the figure of the ‘picnolept’– the subject who takes a time out from time– has been outside of any theorization ofsubjectivity. But his attention to rhythmswithin consciousness brings his project closerto Henri Lefebvre’s “rythmanalysis”(Lefebvre 2004).

While Redhead has compared Viriliowith Baudrillard (and to Foucault and

Chomsky to a lesser degree), anotherproductive strategy might have been tocompare him to theorists of technology. Forexample, Virilio has noted that few peoplehave written about speed, but one of themwas Marshall McLuhan. Indeed, he believeshe has corrected Marshall McLuhan’sformula: “it is not the medium that is themessage, but merely the velocity of themedium” (Redhead 2004b: 205, italics inoriginal). How well Virilio has written aboutthe ‘technological’ – and how it relates toparticular ways of moving, dwelling, seeing,and being – will have to be assessed bycomparing and contrasting his work withother accounts of technology and culture(e.g. Misa, Brey & Feenberg 2003; Hanke2005).

While Redhead’s book lacks somecomparative depth to more fully understandhis intellectual roots and current place, aswell as an index to help the reader find theirway through the various topics he hasdiscussed or terms he has deployed, he doesprovide several good reasons forremembering Virilio. First and foremost, hiswritings have been prescient aboutinternational relations and future events,including the attacks on 9/11. Second, as apublic intellectual, he has tried to intervenein events like the Kosovo war. Third, he hasapplied his ideas very widely making himrelevant to a wide range of fields. Sucheclecticism is always open to the criticism,from any established disciplinary perspective,that his discourse is superficial,oversimplified, or one-dimensional. But Ihave to concur with Redhead (2004a: 116)when he states that “it would be difficult tothink of theorizing speed, technology andmodernity without some consideration of thework of Virilio”.

Redhead’s study demonstrates that Viriliois an important contemporary thinker. ForVirilio, speed is a spectre haunting the entireworld. Acceleration has been given moreattention in his transdisciplinary writingsthan deceleration or any other informationaldynamics. He has been most incisive aboutwhat the “idolatry of acceleration” meansand how excess speed reverses into itsopposite of immobility than the question ofthe right speed, that is, when to be fast orwhen to be slow. Virilio’s work is clearlygrounded in the traditional metaphysicalquestion of Being rather than thecontemporary problem of becoming. Thecreative side of rapid deterrorialization andpost-media is beyond his critical gaze. While9/11 is an event that lends itself to a Virilianinterpretation, different events such as theZapatista uprising and movement dependedon transnational socio-technical networkcapacity for their survival and success. Eventhough he supports transnationalism, Virilio’sdiscourse on technology fails to see the

landscape of related transnational socialmovements and civil society networksagainst neoliberalism and the US-Iraq war.

Ancient philosopher of change andconflict Heraclitus warned long ago: “Wemust put out the excess rather than the fire”.Virilio has always heeded this warning.

Bob Hanke teaches in the Joint GraduateProgramme in Communication & Cultureand Sociology Department at YorkUniversity. He is the author of “Pre-ElectionPolls and the Democratic Process in Canada:A Report on Accelerated Public Opinion,”and is currently working on a project onmedia and time.

References

Berland, J. (2005) “Mobility”, in T.Bennett, L. Grossberg, M. Morris, NewKeywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture andSociety. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,pp. 217-19.

Bourdieu, P. (2003) “For a Scholarshipwith Commitment”, in Firing Back: Againstthe Tyranny of the Market. New York: TheNew Press, pp. 17-25.

Cook, D. (2003) “Paul Virilio: ThePolitics of ‘Real Time’”, CTHEORY.NET,http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=360, accessed February 23, 2005.

Hanke, B. (2005) “McLuhan, Virilio andSpeed in the Age of Digital Reproduction”,in G. Genosko (ed.), Marshall McLuhan:Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. NewYork: Routledge, pp. 121-56.

Derrida, J., C. Porter, P. Lewis (1984)“No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full SpeedAhead, Seven Missles, Seven Missives)”,Diacritics 14/2: 20-31.

Latour, B. (2004) “From Realpolitik toDingpolitik - An Introduction to MakingThings Public”, http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/96-DINGPOL-INTRO.html, ¶14), accessed on February 23, 2005.

Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rythmanalysis: Space,Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum.

Misa, T. P. Brey & A. Feenberg (Eds.)(2003) Modernity and Technology. Cambridge,MA: The MIT Press.

Redhead, Paul (2004a). Paul Virilio:Theorist for an Accelerated Culture. Toronto:University of Toronto Press.

Redhead, Paul (2004b). The Paul VirilioReader. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Virilio, Paul & Sylvere Lotringer (1997)Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e).

Terranova, T. (2004) “Communicationbeyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics ofInformation”, Social Text 80 (22/3): 51-73.

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Workers at the nuclear reservationin Hanford, Washington, recentlycompleted removal of residual

plutonium from what had been thePlutonium Finishing Plant (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 19 July 2005). In operationfrom 1949 to 1989, the Hanford plant hadbeen the last step in the process ofconverting plutonium nitrate solutions intopure plutonium “buttons” which were sentto other plants to make nuclear bombs.When operations at the 586-square-milereservation ceased in 1989, more than 16metric tons of material containing some formof plutonium remained for disposal. Muchmore clean-up work needs to be done atHanford – dismantling contaminatedequipment, buildings, and so forth. Thetarget date is 2035. The presently estimatedtotal cost of $60 billion USD will almostsurely prove to have been too low. There aredozens of other sites in the USA that alsocontain similarly contaminated materials.Clean-up costs for all these sites will bestaggering.

Then comes the question, what to dowith the contaminated materials, once theyare removed? Because this question is partof the animation of Peter van Wyck’sremarkable Signs of Danger, an appreciationof his accomplishment depends on anunderstanding of what are all too oftenneglected as “esoteric technical details”.Thus, we must proceed, as does van Wyck, alittle further into the terrain of nuclearenergy and its less than desirable products.

All 15 isotopes of plutonium areradioactive. Pu-238, which is the powersource of radioisotope thermoelectricgenerators currently used in navigationbeacons, satellites, cardiac pacemakers, andother implements, has a half-life of 88 years.Two other main isotopes, Pu-239 and Pu-242, have half-lives of 24,000 and 37,600years, respectively. Lest there bemisunderstanding, bear in mind that a half-life of 88 or 37,600 years does not mean thatplutonium is no longer dangerous to lifeforms after that period of time. It meansrather that one-half of the isotope has“decayed” to a more nearly stablecomposition; the other half remains asdangerous as before. Moreover, in the“decay chain” of plutonium the portion ofPu-239 that has decayed during its first half-life, so to speak, has become Uranium 235,which is radioactive with a half-life of morethan 700 million years (the longer half-life isanother way of saying that it is more stablein composition). Although plutonium hasbeen produced in “natural planetaryreactors” (e.g., in uranium deposits at Okloin west Africa), nearly all that is known toexist today has been a product of nuclearreactors that were designed either toproduce material for nuclear weapons or aspower generators for research or forcommercial uses.

Uranium ore consists mostly of U-238,which is not fissile and has a half-life of 4.47billion years. Less than one percent of theore is U-235, which is highly fissile and isused as reactor fuel. Ore is processed byremoving U-238 until the U-235 content isthree to four percent. The U-238 that isremoved, known as “depleted uranium”, isused as armor and as armor-piercingmunitions, as counterweights in the controlsurfaces of many aircraft, and in severalother applications. But most of it isconsidered “waste”. By some estimates thecurrent volume of this category of waste inthe USA is greater than 500,000 metrictons.

The typical reactor fuel, U-235, containssome plutonium, most of which is utilized inthe reaction. The part that is not utilizedremains in the “spent fuel”, which is highlytoxic and radioactive. The radioactive“decay particles” of this spent fuel are in factrather weak (e.g., alpha particles will notpenetrate skin, can be blocked by a sheet ofpaper, etc.; beta particles are a little moreenergetic, though cause nothing like thedamage that results from the neutron andgamma radiation resulting from fission). Butif dust or other pieces of the fuel are inhaledor are ingested via water and/or the foodchain, the damage can be great. While mostingested uranium is excreted, the part that isnot excreted accumulates in bone tissue andcan induce cancers of bone, blood, and othertissues, and its metallic toxicity is greatenough to damage excretory organs severely,especially the kidneys. Inhaled dust, likeradon (a gaseous product in the decay cycleof uranium), can induce lung cancers. Insum, this “spent fuel” is another category ofvery dangerous “waste”. Indeed, it isdangerous chemically as well asradiologically. Not only is it chemically toxicto biological tissues; like piles of cowmanure, it generates heat, and if improperlyaggregated the heat is chemophysicallyexplosive. Again, then, the question,“What to do with this waste?”

The US government began deliberationsabout the storage/disposal of radioactivewaste during the early 1950s. In 1956 theNational Academy of Sciencesrecommended deep salt deposits as thegeologically most stable site for storage ofradioactive wastes. After considering anumber of potential locations, a 3000-footlayer of sedimentary salt centered about one-half mile below ground level in southeasternNew Mexico was chosen for what began as asort of demonstration project. In 1979 theUS Congress authorized the construction ofa Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).Excavation began in 1982. After delays dueto controversies around the project, inter-agency struggles for regulatory authority, andthe like, WIPP took its first shipment of“transuranic waste” on 26 March 1999. Asof 13 July 2005 WIPP had received a total of3,743 shipments, consisting of 312 100-

gallon drums, 4,471 “standard waste boxes”,1,837 “ten-drum overpacks”, and 62,425“waste drums”, altogether amounting tonearly 30,000 cubic meters. Contentsinclude equipment, clothing, and other itemsinvolved in the various clean-up endeavors,as well as the transuranic materialsthemselves. Construction of additionalunderground chambers at WIPP continues.A recent proposal envisioned an“experiment gallery” (after all, a “one-of-a-kind setting”) for studies of interactionsbetween magnetic and radiation fields,searches for weakly interacting massiveparticles and neutrinos, studies of minesafety, and other projects. The facility ismanaged under Department of Energycontract by a private limited liabilitycompany, Washington TRU Solutions, whichis a partnership of two private engineeringand construction companies, theWashington Group International andWeston Solutions. The facility maintains anofficial website (www.wipp.ws), as does theNew Mexico Environment Department(www.nmenv.state.nm.us/wipp).

Signs of Danger tracks main events in thehistory of WIPP to 1999. Its focus is bothmuch wider and narrower, however. Thenarrower aspect has to do with a conundrumthat bubbled to the surface of planning anddesign discussions for WIPP. The site mustbe appropriately marked as dangerous (nodrilling, no excavation, etc.); the markingmust effectively convey the magnitude andintensity of the danger, but do so safely, justas the danger below has been made safe (solong as it remains unaltered, etc.); and themessage must be understandable to peoplefar into future centuries. Panels of expertswere assembled to deal with this conundrum– not just as a theoretical puzzle but in a waythat would issue in the optimal design of anactual marker. The conundrum remains.None of the different designs that have beenor are being considered has proven to be“obviously right”. The Department ofEnergy has said it will continue working on asolution.

The much wider aspect of van Wyck’sbook consists in meditations on threat, thevirtual, relations of the secret and theforgotten, and human-scale elasticities andlimits of signification, and more, allinterspersed with various recitations andcommentaries that invoke standardliteratures from Peirce to Baudrillard,Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva, and Zizek. Themany intersections of complex issues can betreated only sparingly in a text limited to118 pages (plus 13 pages of preface andintroduction and 15 pages of notes). But therichness of blazings and intimations gives anattentive reader maps into some unusualterritories of reciprocity between “themundane” and “the exotic”, “the tamed” and“the wild”, credibility and gullibility,desperation and obliviousness. A brief hintof such explorations can be gained from

A Perilous UniquenessPeter C. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

By Lawrence Hazelrigg

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consideration of the simple point that theintended significance of the WIPP marker(whatever its final installation) will dependon a prior forgetting of the danger that washidden underground and thus made safe.Otherwise, what need of the marker? Theexpected marker would offer the mimeticaction of performance art before/for anaudience who, the final design approversmust believe, will not have expected themessage, at least not in exactly that place,and will thus learn exactly what the designapprovers want them to know.

Deciphering the (i.e., what someoneassumes to be) lithographs or inscriptions ofa forgotten language exemplifies acomparison case: on the assumption thatwhat we are observing are elements and/orcompounds of some sort of linguisticintelligence, we look for markers that canbegin to suggest some relations (equivalence,similarity, difference, etc.) for bridging the“gap” from our language to that language.Trials for Linear A (the assumed ancestor ofLinear B, the language of the ancestors ofour “ancient Greeks”) have demonstratedjust how daunting the task “even” when theseparation is shorter than 3,000 years.Experimental trials of versions of the WIPPmarker are about as feasible as experimentaltrials of global warming or nuclear holocaustor alternative strategic actions to preventeither. Surely if we have learned anythingfrom all or any of the versions of “humanhistory” yet recorded, it is that humans havemuch poorer skills of insight when imagining“the future” than when imagining “the past”.As John Dunn (2000: 198) recentlyreminded: “There is no way of thinkingaccurately about most aspects of the longer-term future, and act relatively effectively inrelation to it”. There are simply too manyvariables, too many uncertainties. Imagine,then, the task, as stipulated by the regulativelegislation behind WIPP, of designating thesite “by the most permanent markers,records, and other passive institutionalcontrols practicable to indicate the dangersof the wastes and their locations”? How doesone read “permanent,” when the danger tobe marked has a half-life of hundreds ofthousands of years? That question wasapparently so intimidatinglyincomprehensible that someone in authorityin the WIPP planning process substituted“10,000 years” – as if this smaller numbermight either be too short to qualify as Dunn’s“longer-term future” or allow the problem ofWIPP’s marker to fall among those aspects ofthe longer-term future that some experts doknow how to think (about) accurately. Is itstill a cliché to say, “This would be oh-so-funny were it not so deadly serious”? Whowould be the marker’s audience in 10,000years? Do we think we can know moreabout them than we know about, say, anyliterate Stagirite who might have struggledover a text in Linear A? Designing amessage for future readers must always be amessage for the designers (whether theimagined reader is a designer’s future self orsomeone later), because the designer mustimagine readers’s message-relevant capabilitysets. Here the task is to face beings wesimply cannot imagine except as an abstractpopulation. If our moralities, that is,propositions of what we owe one another,

include any future actors among those“others” (e.g., our unborn children), are weobligated to consider future actors whom wecannot even imagine?

One would like to see van Wyck’s bookread by all who exercise powers great enoughto affect others. That is improbable, ofcourse. The relatively few actual readerswho read patiently and productively are thelikelier audience, and I recommend the bookalso to them. This recommendation comeswith a warning, however: it can be highlydepressing reading, especially to anyone whostill rues the fact that even after 2300 yearsof improved education most people still havegreat difficulty in understanding Aristotle’sPolitics, and prefer to attribute their difficultyto Aristotle’s “genius”.

Production values of the book aregenerally good, but a few problems should benoted. Indexing is now seldom a serious partof the art of book-making (perhaps becauseof decline in serious book-reading), butincorrect page numbers, missing entries, andredundant contents suggest inattention.Although all works cited appear in footnotes,citations are mixed with many (usually veryinteresting) content footnotes; a collectedbibliography would have been helpful. Anappended chronology of WIPP events endsin 1999; an extension could have usefullyoutlined some of the continuingcontroversies, accessions, and so forth. Andwhile van Wyck is no less a stickler for factsthan Borges’ narrator in “Pierre Menard”, afew failures of fact checking crept innonetheless. For instance, as of July 2005elements 117 and 118 had not beendemonstrated (p. 16; the 1999 claim of“discovery” was later withdrawn), and theinitial claim for elements 113 and 115 hadyet to be duplicated. A second instance:the statement that “the larger the atomicnumber, the less stable the atomic structure,and the more rapid its breakdown” (17) iswide of the mark (e.g., U-238 is far morestable than any isotopes of radium, element88; curium 247 (element 96) has a half-life of16 million years, to Pu-239’s 24,000 years;and so on).

Finally, that I highly recommend vanWyck’s latest book (as well as his prior book;van Wyck 1997) to many different readersand different levels of reader is testimony tohis compositional skills as well as to theworth of his arguments, but it does not meanthat I have no reservations about thearguments. What Valéry (1952: 237) saidspecifically of the writer of poetry I believeextends to writers generally: that a writermust “create the need, the goal, the means,and even the obstacles”, all of which areimplicated in the creative action of the art.Selections, perhaps especially of theobstacles, should be made with strategicforethought, however. For example, whereasvan Wyck (85) wants to regard “modernthreat” – or “modern ‘ecological risks’”, asEwald [1993: 222] calls them – as unique, Iwould caution that if a category as such istruly unique, we are completely impoverishedagainst it. Unless it shares at least somethingwith one other category, indeed, we arethoughtless toward it. It escapes ourperception (even the perception of “puzzle”,a category of instances). Granted, 10,000

years is a few orders of difference from ourusual temporal scales of everyday life, andthere is no doubt that at least the politics ifnot the moralities of our “everyday fears”have taken note of the difference and thereasons for it. But this is not to say that “thethreat” coming from those reasons and thedifference they make is unique tout court.Fortunately, van Wyck sometimes ignores hisobstacle of uniqueness (88-89), with verygood consequence.

It has of course become all too easy tofeel overwhelmed in and by this “world wenever made”, thus then to slide into an ethic,perhaps also a morality and politics, of brutalawe and resignation. I do not think that vanWyck or the part of him that became thisbook has entered that prison. I do notice,however, a thematic undercurrent that canbe summarized in a question referred fromthe haunting recognition of human fallibility:“What to do about that?” Can humansinvent a strategy of action that couldsomehow be immune to dialectics ofintentionality and condition/consequence(whereby the unintended so often swampsthe intended)? Human being, the self-conscious fragility of which suggests that itmight be some experimental presence “innature”, has become so enormously powerfulthat it is capable of destroying itself utterly,and most known conditions of life on thisplanet along with it. There is no guaranteeagainst that end. What is new is the scale ofthe power, not the presence of fallibility, theaccidental, uncertainties, or a probabilisticcalculus of events. That difference is quiteenough, perhaps too much in the end.Human rationality has too often failed tokeep track of, much less adequately manage,the concatenating chains of effects issuingfrom actions taken long ago. There isnothing new in that fact of failure. But nowthe potency of actions and their effects hasreached a scale that can very easilyoverwhelm human survivability. As vanWyck repeatedly points out, it is possible that“we” have already set in train theconcatenations that will overwhelm all abilityto survive, though the outcome is not yetapparent. One of the gems he has left to anattentive reader in Signs of Danger iscrystallized from his meditations particularlyon Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of theperformative category “threat” and Deleuze’streatment of “the virtual” vis-à-vis “the real”.It is very nearly enough to induce belief that,because of the enormity of the power humanbeings have achieved during the pastcentury, the “ecological threat” impossiblyperformed by/as any interpellation from anypossible WIPP marker is unique in humanhistory after all.

Lawrence Hazelrigg is Professor Emeritus ofSociology, Florida State University, andAdjunct Professor of Sociology, Penn State.His relevant works include Cultures of Nature(University Press of Florida, 1995) and“Marx and the Meter of Nature”, RethinkingMarxism 6 (Summer 1993): 104-122.

References

Dunn, John (2000) The Cunning ofUnreason: Making Sense of Politics. London:HarperCollins.

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Ewald, François (1993) “Two Infinities ofRisk”, in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. andtrans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Valéry, Paul (1952) Lettres à quelques-uns. Paris: Gallimard.

van Wyck, Peter C (1997) Primitives inthe Wilderness. Albany: State University ofNew York Press.

In his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image,Gilles Deleuze uses the cinema as his

workbook for developing philosophical ideas.A predominant example is his thesis oncinematic movement. Deleuze grounds hisstudy of the cinema in a Bergsonianunderstanding of the image. He claims thatthe cinematic image is a “movement-image”,and from this he thinks through a wholegamut of philosophical problems, such as therelation between matter and image in termsof the question of movement/time.

Another idea in the cinema books, butone much less examined, is Deleuze’sconcept of the sign. Thinking about theimage in terms of the problem of the signand language is not itself new: it has beenaround since the 1920s, and in the 1960sMetz was the first to use modernstructural/linguistic models to develop thisproblem (Guzzetti 292). For Metz, the imageis a sign in so far as: 1) it is a material thatrepresents reality; and 2) the nature of itsrepresentation of reality depends on the waythe sign is shaped by social/cultural codes.Deleuze’s perspective on the cinematic signis a little different. First of all, his semioticsis developed in step with his determinationof the image as movement-image.Consequently, since the image is movement-image, underlying Deleuze’s entire cinematicproject is the equation of image and matter.This makes Deleuze’s cinema semiotics also asemiotics of the material world. Second ofall, Deleuze dismisses the primacy given therole of the code in semiology. For Deleuze, asign is meaningful because of its semioticmatter, not because of the code. He uses aconcept of expression (from his earlier workon Spinoza) to describe sign-formation as aself-modulation that is independent oftranscendent structures. Third, he adaptsCharles S. Peirce’s semeiotics to describe arange of outcomes of expression — in otherwords, a range of different signs in thecinema.

In this essay I will explain Deleuze’ssemiotics in detail. There is a paucity oftexts concerned with an examination of andengagement with Deleuze’s concept of thesign. And more broadly, not much has beenwritten on the potential of semeiotics for asemiotic analysis of the moving image.There have been inroads into this problem,but these have only gone as far as toconsider the moving image in relation to thetypology Peirce builds around therepresentative condition of the sign — inother words, the sign-object relation as aFirst (Icon), Second (Index) or Third(Symbol) — using this range ofrepresentation as a way of offering an

alternative to semiology’s preference for thecoded sign. I will make clear how Deleuze’suse of Peirce and development of a semioticsis much more complicated and yields a greatpotential for future semiotic analyses of thecinema.

Most important about my argument isthe way Deleuze translates his concept ofexpression into semeiotics and develops arich and practical range of signs in thecinema. Looking closely at the cinema,reading between the lines of Deleuze’s thesis,reveals a version of Peirce’s Tri-Square ofsign elements underlying the cinema books,and in terms of the (hierarchical)combination of these elements, a version ofPeirce’s triadic (completed) signs. Thedifference, however, is the sense in whichDeleuze’s signs are expressions of semioticmatter, and consequently, that the structureof Deleuze’s semiotics is a structure ofimmanence. Deleuze doesn’t say as much, yetI think breaking his argument down to itsbare bones and thinking about his signs inthis way gives us a practical semiotics we cantake from the cinema books and apply to allfilms.

1. Background and Context

Consider a key relationship in the cinemabooks. This relationship involves a signaleticmaterial on the one hand and the sign onthe other. The signaletic material is thesemiotic matter of the image, the stuff of theimage. This is the image in terms of itsqualities, colours, and sounds — the mostbasic sense of the image. Furthermore, sinceDeleuze specifies how the image moves(“movement-image”), equating the image andreality, the signaletic material of the image isthe same underlying stuff that makes up theobjects, bodies, sights and sounds of thematerial world. The sign is the image’sfunction as meaningful unit for somebody.Meaning in this sense is identified with theparticular way the signaletic material isembodied in an image; for example, the wayqualities, shapes, colours and sounds areembodied in the image of a snarling dog.Meaning is not the end result of relating theimage of a snarling dog to a code (snarlingdog = rabies); meaning resides strictly in thenature of the embodiment.

Deleuze describes the signaletic materialin the following way: he calls it 1) an “a-signifying and a-syntaxic material” eventhough, 2) “it is not amorphous” (Time 29).From the first point, the a-signifying meansthat the signaletic material is not naturally asignifying matter — in other words, it is notnaturally meaningful. Furthermore, the a-syntaxic means much the same, but with a

subtle difference. The a-syntaxic means thatthe signaletic material is not naturallyorganized into a structure of meaningfulunits. The second point tells us that thesignaletic material is not amorphous: it is notindeterminate and without any shape orcharacter. By putting these two pointstogether, then, Deleuze is telling us that thesignaletic material is not a meaningful ororganized substance, but neither is itmeaningless or amorphous. Consequently,Deleuze also explains how the signaleticmaterial is virtual. It’s real but not actual.We can’t see it, but we know it’s there.

Why does Deleuze determine thesignaletic material according to the abovetwo points? First, if the signaletic material issignifying/syntaxic then it would already bemeaningful in some sense. Thus the sign, inembodying the signaletic material, would infact be functioning to uncover a latent orpossible meaning. Now, if the meaning ofthe sign is possible, it is inseparable fromactual existing meaning. Consequently, themeaning uncovered by the sign would alwaysbe determined in some sense by pre-existentmeaning. Second, if the signaletic materialwas amorphous, then the sign would notuncover a latent meaning (for there is nomeaning to be uncovered). Instead the sign,in embodying the signaletic material, wouldin fact be shaping the signaletic material andmolding it into meaningful substance. Forthe sign to assume such a function it mustalready be meaningful in some sense,implying that the meaning resulting from thesignaletic material–sign relationship would,at best, be a version of pre-existent meaning.For Deleuze, both the above positions onmeaning have a negative impact oncreativity in language.

Deleuze claims that the signaleticmaterial is neither amorphous norsignifying/syntaxic. It is an existing matter,but since its nature accords with neither ofthe above conditions, he calls it a “plasticmass” (Time 29), ensuring that the meaningproduced in his conception of the sign is nota version of something pre-existent, but iscompletely new, fresh, original andspontaneous.

For Deleuze, what is the relationship ofsign and signaletic material? We know thatthe sign, as the embodiment of the signaleticmaterial, does not function to make actualsome possible meaning, and neither does itshape the signaletic material. Deleuze tellsus that the sign is 1) “irreducible” to thesignaletic material, yet 2) “not without adeterminable relationship to it” (Time 34).For Deleuze, then, the sign determines thesignaletic material, but not in the sense Ihave noted so far. One way we can describe

SRB Insight:

Deleuze, Peirce and the Cinematic SignBy Roger Dawkins

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this process is with Deleuze’s concept ofexpression. Deleuze develops this concept inmost detail in his monograph on Benedict deSpinoza. André Pierre Colombat (2000:16)gives us an insight into its meaning when hedefines expression as a process of unfoldingand involvement. What is suggested is a sensein which the sign is an expression of thesignaletic material in so far as it marks theextension and transformation of thesignaletic material into something different.Consider again the above example of a sign:the image of a snarling dog. For Deleuze thisimage is not a sign in so far as it is a jumbleof stuff (qualities, shapes, colours) to whichmeaning is attributed (codes). To be sure, itis an assemblage of stuff that is meaningfulbecause of the way, as an assemblage, thesemiotic matter is unfolded, existing slightlydifferent to itself in its form as a sign.

2. Enter Peirce and Spinoza

“Not a great deal can be done withcodes” (Deleuze Time 28). This is the claimDeleuze makes in the cinema books whenlevelling a critique against semiology.

Keyan G. Tomaselli (1989 qtd. in 1996:44-5) is of the same opinion. Whenconsidering a suitable model for the analysisof how meaning is made in ethnographicdocumentaries, he claims that semiologytakes codes for granted. He writes that codesare not “natural, neutral or even necessary”.Tomaselli states that the coded sign bringswith it a notion of meaning that is “saturatedwith the ideological imperatives of society”(45). Furthermore, he feels that theseideological imperatives unavoidably restrictthe sign’s ability to represent an experience.

For Tomaselli, Peirce’s semeiotics is atheory of meaning that considers the signindependently of codes (transcendentstructures). In Tomaselli’s reading of Peirce,signs are the way a subject makes sense of anencounter, but this process of making sensedoes not depend entirely on the subject’sreference to codes. Tomaselli explains thispoint in semeiotics when he notes three stepsinvolved in a subject’s attempt to make senseof an encounter. These steps correspond tothe fundamental properties of the universe,or what Peirce calls the phenomenologicalcategories of Being: Firstness, Secondnessand Thirdness. Each step, taken separately,implies a different notion of what anencounter is, and each step implies adifferent notion of the sign (there are signs ofFirstness, Secondness and Thirdness). And,the semiological sign is only one part ofsemeiotics: it falls among Peirce’s logical orconventional sign of Thirdness (Symbol).Thus semeiotics supports a broader and morevaried idea of the sign and meaning thansemiology.

Similar to Tomaselli, Deleuze uses Peirceto move beyond the limitations of codedsigns and transcendent structures. ButDeleuze also uses semeiotics to develop atheory of expression in the cinema. Based onBergson’s matter/time ontology, Deleuzeequates matter in the universe with thecinematic image (movement-image). Hethen uses Peirce’s signs of Firstness,Secondness and Thirdness to conceive atheory of meaning in the cinema that isindependent of transcendent structures — in

other words, he uses Peirce’s signs toconceive of a semiotic idea of expression.Thus Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza is also keyhere. Deleuze conceives of Peirce’s signs asexpressions because, from Spinoza, heunderstands Peirce’s categories as immanentto the universe/cinema. The categories andthe universe are “in immanence” (which Iborrow from Deleuze) in the sense that thecategories rightfully exist and are notdetermined to exist by a transcendent force inthe material world.

Peirce’s theory depends on his division ofthe universe into three fundamentalcategories. These are ordinal and hierarchical— in other words, Thirdness containsSecondness and Firstness, and Secondnesscontains Firstness — in the same way that aRussian doll contains a doll within a dollwithin a doll. When the categories areseparated, Firstness is existence in-itself, forexample, redness (independent of itsembodiment in an object) is a First;Secondness is actual or genuine existence,when the redness is embodied in an object ina state of things (a rose, a fez, a Ferrari);Thirdness is logical existence, when anobject in a state of things is conceived as ageneral type that is representative of somelaw.

Consider Peirce’s concept of the sign.The categories of Being have a bearing onPeirce’s concept of the sign in two ways: 1)For Peirce, a sign, like everything else in theuniverse, is divisible into the threecategories. There are, then, three properties(or what I will call aspects) of every sign.These are apparent when Peirce defines thesign as something that stands for something else(its object) for some interpreting mind. Fromthis definition a sign is first of all somethingin-itself, and Peirce calls this aspect of thesign the Representamen. Second, a signstands in a relation with an object, andPeirce calls this aspect of the sign the Object.Third, a sign–object relation is interpreted bysomebody, and Peirce calls this aspect of thesign the Interpretant; 2) The sign is the waya subject makes sense of an encounter. Insemeiotics there are three kinds ofRepresentamen, three kinds of Object, andthree kinds of Interpretant.

For clarity I call Peirce’s aspects of thesign, when considered from the perspectiveof their different categorical kinds, the signelements of semeiotics. From the threeaspects of every sign are nine sign elementsof semeiotics. These elements arerepresented below in Peirce’s Tri-Square:

Table 1

A Tri-Square of the Nine Sign Elements ofSemeiotics:

Table 1 sets out the three different kinds ofRepresentamen, Object and Interpretant ofsemeiotics. I will not explicate them here,instead I will simply note how each signelement is characteristic of a particularcategory of Being; for example, a Legisign is ageneral type that is a sign (a law), an Index isa genuine sign–object relation (smoke as asign of its object, fire), and a Rheme, since itfocuses on the Firstness (qualities) of anobject, is a general interpretation.

When referring to the sign from theperspective of its combination of the signelements in a practical context, I will call thesign a completed sign. The fact that there arenine sign elements suggests a certain amountof variation potential to the completed sign.But, it is important to remember that Peirce’scategories are ordinal and hierarchical, andthis means that the combination of elementsinvolved in every sign is ordered by a certainleading principle derived from Peirce’sphenomenology. This is what James Liszkacalls the “qualification rule”, which statesthat a First cannot be combined with aSecond or a Third, and similarly, that aSecond cannot be combined with a Third(1996: 45). The result is that Peirce’s signelements combine to form only ten classes ofcompleted sign:

Table 2

Ten Classes of Completed Signs ofSemeiotics (Deledalle 2000: 19)

* Note: All expressions such as R1, O2, I3should be read according to Peirce in thefollowing way: a Representamen that is aFirst, an Object that is a Second, and anInterpretant that is a Third (8.353).

I will not explain these completed signshere, but merely offer examples: a RhematicIconic Qualisign is a feeling of red; anexample of a Dicent Indexical Sinsign is atelephone ring; and an example of anArgument Symbolic Legisign is a syllogism(Parmentier 1994: 18).

The most important thing aboutDeleuze’s appropriation of Peirce is hisunderstanding of the immanence of thecategories. If the categories are immanent,then there is nothing transcendent thatdetermines a certain kind of experience as acertain kind of sign. This means that a signsimply exists, and a subject’s relationship witha sign is based on nothing more than thematerial properties of that particularencounter. In The Movement-Image Deleuzegoes to great lengths to prove how thecategories are immanent to theuniverse/cinema. And on this pointBergson’s ontology is also key to Deleuze’sargument. He equates Peirce’s categorieswith what Bergson describes as differentlevels of subjectivity. Consequently, thededuction of subjectivity, according to whichsubjectivity is not determined by atranscendent force, is homologous to the

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deduction of the categories — according towhich the categories arise in the universe —and testimony to their immanence.

In so far as the categories are essentiallyimmanent, it becomes apparent in thecinema books that the categories, in theirnaturally “tangled” form (Peirce 1.280), arethe semiotic matter of the cinema (plasticmass). They are in immanence: nothing istranscendent to the signaletic material.Moreover, it follows that the signs producedfrom the categories/signaletic material arenot rightfully formed as a result of anytranscendent force. Their meaning is notrightfully pre-determined. Thus with theidentification of the categories in the cinemaDeleuze has the foundation from which todevelop his semiotics.

From Peirce Deleuze notes threecategories in the cinema, and I call these theimage-types of the cinema. Deleuze callsFirstness the affection-image: similar to Peirceit is the category of matter’s existence in-itself, not as a real thing (a delimited thing inthe universe, a Second), but a quality, avisual impression, an optical effect only.Deleuze calls Secondness the action-image:again it is similar to Peirce’s category in thatit is the domain of real objects in real spaces:it is the domain of Realism (Movement 141).Deleuze calls Thirdness the relation-image:like Thirdness in semeiotics, the relation-image is also concerned with logicalrelations.

Next, while Peirce describes three aspectsof the sign — Representamen, Object andInterpretant — Deleuze begins by notingonly two aspects of the cinematic sign. Hecalls these Genesis and Composition. At thisstage it is quite clear that Deleuze is stickingquite closely to Peirce’s concepts of theRepresentamen and Object respectively. YetDeleuze’s terminology also emphasizes theimportance of Spinozistic concepts in hissemiotics.

In Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s Ethicshe emphasizes Spinoza’s claim to oneimmanent substance in the universe. Spinozadefines substance as “absolutely infinite”being (Ethics ID4), and in this definition heconceives of God as that which is “in-itselfand is conceived through itself” (ID3).Furthermore, human being “is a mode of theattributes of nature”, and is conceived as“part of a dynamic and interconnectedwhole” (Gatens 1996: 165). Deleuzeidentifies how, since Being is univocal,particular things (plants, animals, rocks) areproduced as the effect of a two-fold processof the expression of substance. In the firststage of expression, attributes areconstituted. Deleuze points out thatattributes are “forms common to God” andcontain the essences of substance(Expressionism 47). They are the basic formsfrom which life is developed and they arepotentially infinite in number. For thisreason Deleuze identifies attributes withgenesis, calling them “genetic elements” (80).The second stage is based on the expressionof an essence in the attributes by a particularthing, which Deleuze refers to generally as abody (a plant, animal and rock are all bodies).Deleuze (1978/2002: 6) notes that a bodyexpresses a genetic element of substance(attribute) through the “composite or complex

relation” of its parts (my emphasis).

Deleuze’s understanding of these twostages of expression is key in his reading ofsemeiotics and his own development of thecinematic sign. I mentioned above thatGenesis is the concept Deleuze uses toconceive of the sign in-itself(Representamen), but in my opinion thisconcept also reveals his understanding ofhow the sign, in-itself, is equivalent to theessence (genetic element) of a body inSpinoza’s theology. In respect of thisequivalence, we can note that the sign (in-itself) is an essence of a category of Beingand is immanent to the cinema.Composition is the concept Deleuze uses toconceive of the sign’s embodiment in asign–object relation (Object), but continuingmy argument, this concept also revealsDeleuze’s understanding of how thesign–object relations of semeiotics areequivalent to the way a body in Spinozaexists. For Spinoza, a body exists becausethe composite relation of its parts expressesan essence of substance, not because atranscendent God breathes life into itsmatter. In the same way, Deleuze is claimingthat a sign is embodied when a Compositionof elements in the cinematic frame express acategory of Being characteristic of a Genesis.With Genesis and Composition Deleuzeguarantees that a sign is an existing thingthat is meaningful in-itself. Returning to hiscritique of structuralism, then, Deleuze nowdefinitively rules-out the need fortranscendent structures to shape what wouldotherwise be an amorphous blob of semioticmatter.

Although Deleuze’s concern for the bulkof the cinema books lies with the way thesigns of the cinema are embodied —independently of their interpretation, hedoes eventually develop a third aspect of thesign quite clearly equivalent to Peirce’sInterpretant. Deleuze calls this aspect of thesign the Noosign, and I argue that itcompletes the (immanent) structure ofDeleuze’s semiotics. Deleuze uses Genesis todescribe a kind of sign particular to acategory of the cinema; Composition todescribe the different ways a sign isembodied particular to the differentcomposite relations of a category of thecinema, and also, to demonstrate how andwhy a kind of sign is immanent (it isexpressed in a composite body of cinematicelements); and the Noosign to describe thedifferent kinds of interpretation forced byeach category of composite whole. In thesame way that Peirce’s three kinds ofInterpretant represent a continuum ofinterpretation: from the most general kind ofinterpretation (a qualitative interpretation orsensation: Rheme), to a more specific orfactual kind of interpretation (of an object’sproperties: Dicent), and finally, to a logicalinterpretation of an object (the formation oflaws, judgements or concepts: Legisign) — ifwe look closely at the latter chapters of TheTime-Image then we can see how Deleuze’sNoosigns also represent a continuum ofthought: from the most absolute kind ofthought to conceptual thought. Mostimportantly too, since the composite whole(sign) exists rightfully in-itself (it expressesan essence of substance in the same way as abody in Spinoza’s theology), the meaning of

the sign is contained naturally in thematerial properties of the sign. In otherwords, an interpretation does not rightfullybegin by attributing transcendent ideas towhat is otherwise amorphous semioticmatter.

3. A Structure of Immanence

If we follow through this thesis of thetriadic sign in the cinema books, then by theconclusion of Deleuze’s study we can notethe following version of Peirce’s Tri-Square ofsign elements:

Table 3

A Tri-Square of Nine Sign Elements of TheMovement-Image

Represented above is the principal structureof signs in The Movement-Image. It must benoted, however, that Deleuze is not explicitabout presenting his signs in this way; it ismy thesis that this structure is underlying inDeleuze’s study. The signaletic material isthe tangled skein of affection-images, action-images and relation-images. From Table 3, asign in Deleuze’s semiotics is something in-itself, an essence (Genesis); it is manifestaccording to the particular way that essenceis expressed in a composite whole of imagesin the frame (Composition); and it forces acertain kind of thought (Noosign). It is astructure of immanence because there isnothing rightfully transcendent to Deleuze’ssigns pre-determining their interpretation.

I will be brief in describing myunderstanding of the specific character ofthese sign elements. Similar to semeiotics,Firstness for Deleuze (affection-image) is thecategory of Being in-itself. He borrowsdirectly from semeiotics when he describes itsGenesis as the quality in-itself, or Qualisign,and describes a qualitative Compositionbased on Peirce’s iconic sign–object relation,or Icon. He uses an actor’s face as hispredominant example of the Icon, statingthat a facial expression can stand for thequalities of some object. He isn’t explicitabout naming the Noosign of Firstness, buthe is quite clear in asserting a kind ofthought associated with the affection-imagethat is characterized as an interpretation ofsome possible state of things. This Noosign isequivalent to Peirce’s Rheme, and for thesake of my analysis I call it a Term (Peircesometimes uses Term and Rhemeinterchangeably).

Deleuze calls Secondness the action-image. His Genesis and Composition of theaction-image are much the same as Peirce’sRepresentamen and Object of Secondness,even though he uses different names. ForPeirce, the Representamen of Secondness isthe actual event constituted by the relationof two things, the Sinsign. For Deleuze, theessence of the sign of the action-image ismuch the same, the only difference beingthat he conceives of an event in terms of therelation between a situation and an action. Tomark this emphasis, Deleuze calls the sign ofthe action-image the Imprint. Peirce

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describes the sign–object relation particularto Secondness with the Index. Deleuze’sComposition of the action-image is a versionof the same: he describes the expression ofSecondness in a genuine relation of cinematicelements. Yet he uses two main scenarios todescribe this category of Composition. First,Deleuze focuses on the relation between asituation and an action; for example, when acharacter responds to a crisis in thecommunity and restores a sense of order.With this scenario Deleuze explains the firstkind of genuine relation as a binomial, andmodifying Peirce’s terminology slightly hestates that the first kind of Composition ofthe action-image is a Synsign. Second,Deleuze focuses on the relations of actionsthemselves. Furthermore, in so far asDeleuze claims that actions typically disclosesome kind of situation, he describes aversion of Peirce’s Index and states that thesecond kind of Composition of the action-image (in Chapters 9 and 10 of TheMovement-Image) is an Index.

With his discussion of Robert Flaherty’sdocumentary style, Deleuze implies aNoosign of the action-image equivalent toPeirce’s Dicent. He writes that films likeNanook of the North are predominantlyaction-images and simply present an“exposition” of the milieu, capturing in the“raw” a character’s “tête-à-tête with themilieu” (Movement 143). Another way ofputting this criticism is to say that Deleuze(although he is not explicit about it) isnoting a Dicent as the dominant mode ofinterpretation of Flaherty’s films. Logicalclaims are not made; instead a sign forces akind of propositional thought only. For thesake of my analysis I name the correspondingNoosign the Proposition.

Deleuze’s relation-image is based onPeirce’s category of Thirdness.Consequently, his sign elements function inthe same way as Peirce’s Legisign, Symboland Argument. Deleuze, however, doesn’tlabel the Genesis of the relation-image withPeirce’s Legisign. Instead, it is my claim thathe borrows Peirce’s concept of the Symbol forthe Genesis of the relation-image, in order toemphasize the plurality of relations potentialto the relation-image. Thus Deleuze shiftsPeirce’s Symbol from its function as thesecond aspect of the sign of Thirdness to thefirst aspect of the relation-image. In thisway, he shifts the emphasis from theSymbol’s sign–object relation, to theSymbol’s concept as an abstract andpotentially open-ended relation (in the firstthird of Chapter 12 of The Movement-Image).What about the relation-image’sComposition and Noosign? Deleuzedescribes two kinds of Compositionequivalent to the abstract sign–objectrelation characteristic of Thirdness, and hecalls these the Mark and Demark. TheMark is an abstract relation of elementsbased on their common properties, and theDemark is an abstract relation of elementsbased on their differences. And if we shiftthe emphasis in Deleuze’s examination ofmontage (in his argument about “classical”cinema) away from an emphasis onhistoricity, it becomes clear that hisdiscussion also describes the kind of thoughtparticular to the relation-image. Montagerefers to the relations of images, and more

specifically, montage is one way of describinga grouping together of elements that areotherwise unrelated — it refers us to astrictly logical Composition of elements.Thus the kind of thought Deleuze identifieswith montage is the kind of thoughtcharacteristic of the Mark/Demark and therelation-image of the cinema. Furthermore,in so far as Deleuze (from Sergei Eisenstein)notes the “whole” (concept) as the outcomeof a montage process that is essentiallydialectical in nature, the immanence ofDeleuze’s structure of signs is emphasized.This is due to the fact that thinking (in thecase of a dialectical relation) is an evaluationbased on the abstract relations of terms notdetermined by transcendent structures (Time158). For the sake of my argument I namethe sign of conceptual thought in Deleuze’ssemiotics the Whole.

I mentioned above how, for Peirce, a signis a combination of three aspects. Thisconcept of the sign is much the same forDeleuze: what I call a completed sign is acombination of Genesis, Composition andNoosign. Again, Deleuze isn’t so explicitabout this: he doesn’t use the words“completed sign” and he doesn’t render hissemiotics according to Table 3, but hisdiscussion nevertheless makes the structure Iam identifying quite transparent. When hedescribes the dialectical relations of imagesin Eisenstein’s films, he is describing what Iidentify as a Whole Mark/Demark Symbol.When he describes Flaherty’s documentaries,most pertinently, to be concerned with acharacter’s battle with a milieu, he isdescribing an event that is a sign, expressedin a binomial, and forcing a range ofpropositional style thoughts: a PropositionSynsign Imprint. When he describes Joan ofArc’s face in Carl Th. Dreyer’s Passion of Joanof Arc as a quality expressed in-itself, a pureIcon, giving rise to an affective charge in theviewing subject, he is pointing to a [TermIcon] Qualisign (Movement 107; NB. I usesquare brackets here in order to denote thoseelements of the completed sign that do nothave to be stated when discussing the sign,since a Qualisign necessarily includes anIcon and a Term).

Moreover, when Deleuze describesspecial signs of the relation-image — in theWestern for example — it can be argued thathe is alluding to the hierarchical flexibility ofhis semiotic structure and the sense inwhich, similar to semeiotics, a kind of sign(Representamen/Genesis) can be expressedin a range of different cinematic elements(Object/Composition), and accordingly, canforce a range of different thought processes(Interpretant/Noosign). Taking the Western,Deleuze describes how the hero is often“representative” of a “collectivity”: “Thehero becomes equal to the milieu via theintermediary of the community” (Movement146). This suggests some cases where thehero acts as a result of the wishes of thecommunity and, according to what thesewishes may involve, we can assume theyinclude the community’s desire for justice,and perhaps even vengeance. It can be said,then, that the binomial implied by the hero’saction is expressive of a Symbol. And itfollows that the binomial is not interpretedlogically, but in terms of the factualinformation afforded by the combination of

cinematic elements (Proposition), orqualitative information (Term). What isidentified are the Proposition Synsign Symboland the Term Synsign Symbol respectively.

When Deleuze describes a quality that isnot expressed in-itself (Qualisign) but is tiedto a state of things, it is clear to a reader ofsemeiotics that he is describing Peirce’s ideaof an Icon that does not stand completely forits object. In this case Deleuze is identifyingan event that is expressed qualitativelythrough an Icon: a Term Icon Imprint.Importantly also, Deleuze is pointing outhow there are degrees of purity of the Iconand the thought process associated. In termsof a comparison to semeiotics, the mostcommon Icon is tied to a state of things.This is the most common kind because, asFloyd Merrell makes clear, Peirce’s Qualisign(a pure Icon) is only given in fleetingmoments of lost consciousness orforgetfulness (1995: 102). Thus Deleuze’sdiscussion of the construction of Qualisignsthrough editing and framing also reveals thepotential of cinema, as a text, to readilypresent what may otherwise go unnoticed ineveryday life.

Regarding my discussion of thecompleted signs of The Movement-Image (andtaking into account the hierarchicalflexibility of sign elements noted above), Iwill put forward the following table ofcompleted signs in Deleuze’s semiotics:

Table 4

Ten Principal Completed Signs of Deleuze’sSemiotics

In this paper I cannot describe each of thesecompleted signs. Instead I hope only to givean overview of Deleuze’s (Peircian) semioticsof the cinema.

In this essay I have revealed the Peircianstructure of signs underlying Deleuze’scinema books. My aim hasn’t been toexplain these signs in any great detail, but tomake the structure, and its flexibility, clear.This is because it isn’t just a structure ofsigns in Deleuze’s cinema books, but itrepresents a Peircian semiotics of the imageapplicable to the entirety of the cinema, inthe same way Peirce’s signs are applicable tothe entirety of the material world.

Roger Dawkins received his PhD from theSchool of Theatre, Film and Dance at TheUniversity of New South Wales in 2005. Heis currently teaching in Film and DigitalMedia at NSW.

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